With how often Bram Stoker’s novel is routinely plucked from the shelf in some adaptational form – say what you will about that text, but Dracula’s never going to accumulate any dust — it’s pretty weird how no one thought to make a feature-length film about the doomed ship Demeter, which was hired to haul the Count’s corpse from Transylvania to London, in the nearly 130 year existence of the text. It’s essentially proto-Alien: A bunch of shipping agents have to confront an otherworldly evil and are plucked off, one by one, by the monster lurking within their cargo hold. Andre Ovredal’s The Last Voyage of the Demeter offers a compelling reason why no one did so: Like John Carter, the window had passed, and it suffers exquisitely from comparisons to the source’s descendants, no matter how far-flung they may be in terms of physical distance or in time itself. Its attempts to modernize itself are also painfully on-trend in the post-Twilight era, which creates an odd tension between how traditional it wants to be and how reactively current in the form it believes the market wants it to be.
Ovredal’s a strange filmmaker, to be sure, and one of the few people who I believe could have competently taken on a project like this, regardless of how much I’ve enjoyed his previous work. He has a decent skill at depicting the unnatural and otherworldly (Trollhunter is still one of the more interesting found footage features from the last decade), and his period pieces, like Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, have the feeling of their cultural moment, even if some of the details are oddly presented. The physical realization of the setting is what he excels at in Demeter, and he has a decent way of making the ship feel both vast – it is a decently large vessel, after all – and way too claustrophobic for comfort. Even with his reliance on CGI (let’s be real: After Master and Commander underperformed, practical sea-faring cinema became the provenance of Disney), it’s still effectively creepy, evoking a kind of classic Hammer vibe in its presentation. The crew, as well, is styled appropriately, being a bunch of tatted-up scurvy-ridden sailors bearing all forms of facial hair and various stages of tooth decay.
They’re also where the problems begin. Stoker’s “Log of the Demeter” runs a scant 1780 words, with plenty of opportunities for one to insert their own characters into the mix without fundamentally altering it as a text. You’d assume that it’d be the story of the crew themselves, struggling against the unknown, but Ovredal and his writers choose a different path, with our POV character being Clemens (Corey Hawkins, sporting some dope facial hair), a doctor who, after saving the Captain’s grandson from being crushed by one of Dracula’s boxes o’ dirt during the loading process, hitches a ride with them back to England from Eastern Europe (his knowledge of astronomy, in addition to his medical skills, is also a big selling point as to why they’d take him on board and promise him a part of their bonus if they make it to London on time). Already, the crew is presented as a reactionary body, with the requisite tensions about having a stranger on board that are only exacerbated once the good doctor finds a living woman, sporting bite marks and some sort of blood infection, lying in a pile of dirt after one of the crates below deck splits open during a storm. He advocates for his patient, against the sailors’ wishes – she is a stowaway and, worse, a walking curse for the voyage, who they think should be disposed of either at the next port or over the side of the vessel – and it’s then that Dracula emerges and starts plucking them off, one by one, all while our Man of Science attempts to understand the nature of the Vampire before it’s too late for all of them to do anything about it.
Clemens’ presence on board is an interesting and provocative addition to the source material – it’s not exactly like your average ex-Royal Navy manumission conscript would exactly be a campaigner for Civil Rights – but Ovredal flubs it with the way he spotlights his “otherness” to the rest of the crew. Had he just been the ship’s doctor from the start, there might have been a really interesting perspective on how hard times genuinely bring out the worst in former friends and comrades, to say nothing of the possibilities one might have gleaned from appropriating the ending of Romero’s Night of the Living Dead to make a statement about the still-dormant prejudice in rural England. The sort of half-exploration that we see here and his alienation from the rest of his new crewmates are thematically unsatisfying at best and clumsy at worst, even if Hawkins makes for a pretty great scientific horror protagonist, with minor echoes of Peter Cushing in his performance. The dynamics are just not in place to really make it take off in the intended way, even if he has swell performers like Liam Cunningham and David Dastmalchan to work with.
But what’s really gear-grinding is the depiction of Dracula himself, which is just frustrating in all the ways you’d expect a movie trying to make use of and differentiate itself from a hundred-or-so years of vampire films would be. In design, besides the cursory acknowledgment of Murnau’s Nosferatu, he most resembles the pseudo-vamps from Will Smith’s I Am Legend, which seized upon the mindless zombie moment in order to try and adapt a story that featured intelligent and cunning creatures of the night as its antagonists, and he often behaves like one, too. His intelligence comes as a surprise to the crew, who have to be informed by his captive that he’s not just an animal preying on them: he’s rationing them out so that he can be properly fed throughout the voyage, much like they do with the hardtack and livestock. He’s less a calculating and intelligent figure than a bestial shape, which genuinely sucks when you remember that it’s fucking Dracula that you’re dealing with here. His manipulations are mental whispers, with their suggestions offered up in expository dialogue by the characters that he’s tempting, and he barely manages to snarl a couple of words every now and then so that you can be reminded that he’s got the power of speech.
I suppose we should be grateful that Ovredal didn’t have his Foley artists sit down and crack into a dozen Slim Jims every time he moved like every other studio horror director nowadays, but then again, the entire thesis of the Demeter misses the point. Aside from moving the count to England proper, its narrative purpose in Dracula is a demonstration of his fierce power to complement the intelligence we’d witnessed in preceding chapters: He is very much a threat to mind and body. To forsake one for the other is to miss the appeal of the vampire altogether (aside from all of the sexy stuff), a self-inflicted hack-a-Shaq that will, no matter what else happens, disappoint when it steps up to the line to sink two shots (and God help you if it happened while he was pump-faking a three).
Murnau truly may have gotten it right when he had the ship show up in port totally empty, aside from a bevy of rats on board and a few dirt-filled coffins to imply that the plague had claimed all souls in the passage. At least that averts the questions that form in the audience’s mind during the Demeter’s two-hour runtime: if they had just stacked a few crates of dirt on top of Dracula’s own crate, would they have made it to London? Did Dracula’s entire plan for his mid-journey snack really rely on the ignorance of the sailors doing the loading? Or was “do not stack” written on the crate somewhere in Transylvanian?